This blog provides advice to writers on their literary work.
See end of this post for links on these topics:
How can you get the full benefit of workshops? How can you work best with your mentor? What, when, and how should you publish?

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Writers and Collaboration, Part 4: Choosing Your Collaborators

A key factor in a writer working successfully with
other artists is for the author to select good collaborators. To do that, you have to
use a certain amount of objectivity, a kind of objectivity that does not always
come easy to writers. Writers are emotional. We tend to lead with our feelings,
not our rational minds. Feelings are a good guide in choosing collaborators,
but they have to be steered by an objective appraisal of what would or would not
produce a good work of art.

First of all, don’t choose a collaborator simply because
that person is someone you love or like a lot. Yes, it’s great to work with
people you care about, but your eight-year-old’s adorable drawings are probably
not going to be the best illustrations for your writing. The last time a writer
collaborated with his or her child to produce a great work of art was…well, I
can’t think of any.

Likewise, spouses and best friends are not always the ideal
collaborators. Most of us don’t choose our friends and loved ones for their
artistic talent. Not only that, it’s difficult to judge objectively the work of
those we love. There are many examples of writers collaborating well with their
friends—the surrealist group in Paris, for instance, produced numerous amazing
collaborations, such as the movie L’Étoile de merby
Man Ray based on a poem of Robert Desnos, or the wonderful lithographs that
the artist Joan Miró created for poems by André Breton in the series called Constellations.

But not all of us have friends as
talented as Man Ray, Joan Miró, or Georgia O’Keeffe. If you do have a friend or spouse who is artistically accomplished, great! Collaborate with her or him. But don’t expect emotional closeness alone to produce a successful collaboration.

I think it’s often wise to choose as a collaborator an
artist whose work you admire, but don’t necessarily socialize with. You might
get to be friends in the course of your collaboration, but that’s not a crucial
part of the process. The important factor is that you appreciate each other’s work,
and that your artistic styles, themes, and visions harmonize and combine well together.

It’s also advisable to choose an artist who is at least as
accomplished in his or her own domain as you are in yours. You want to grow as
a writer in the collaboration, to learn from the artist(s) you’re working with.
That’s not going to happen if the artist you’re collaborating with is much less
seasoned than you are. In fact, choosing a collaborator who is not as
accomplished as you are could produce a work of art that is not as effective as
your own work, which doesn’t do much for your development as a writer.

The more I work with other artists, the more I feel that
personality is also an important factor in choosing a collaborator. When I
first began collaborating, I didn’t care about temperament. I just wanted to
work with artists I admired. I realized through a series of negative
experiences that the stress of working with someone who is difficult or
egotistical or just plain selfish is not always worth the result, even if it
ends up as a successful collaboration artistically. I know this seems to
contradict what I just said about not choosing your friends as collaborators. I do think there is a happy medium, where you work with collaborators you
admire and like, but who are not necessarily the people you are closest to.